5 things you need to know about a corporate LMS, Part 3

In Part 1 of this article I shared some information about corporate learning management systems (LMSs) and pricing. Key concepts: having your own LMS gives you total control over courses.

In Part 2 we talked about what content you should expect to include on a company learning management system.

Let’s look at a couple additional features you should consider:

1. Standardization. This is my favorite aspect of developing a company-wide LMS. You’re no longer dependent on individual trainers or managers community to community. You’re not dependent, either, on a company that has proprietary control of all your course content, training records and enrollment data. You can create a standardized approach to training all employees, company-wide, using courses you’ve created in-house, courses you’ve licensed from other providers, and content and assessments you’ve determined best help you train your team. You can say, with confidence, every single employee receives the same level, quality and type of training. Every employee is trained YOUR way, no exceptions. No gaps, either, with turnover on a management or trainer level. Pull up training reports from a corporate office and see, at a glance, what training has been completed. Print exception reports and immediately see who’s out of compliance.


2. Sustainability. This winter my family and I went on a one-week trip to Hawaii. It takes me about 4 days to slow down from my usual pace, and 3 days later we were on a plane heading back home. I got to do one hike (from the book I’d purchased of over 50 island hikes); and had altogether too few umbrella drinks. I determined to come back again in two years and stay a full month – but that means I’ve got work to do at the office. I’ve got to build, in every department, sustainable systems that function and report, with or without me.


Training employees in a consistent way has been demonstrated to affect turnover in a significant way. Reducing your turnover is one key element to improving your quality of care – and that means a higher census and a bigger bottom line.

Annually required courses that actually build on knowledge and skills, rather than just repeat old training, is not only appreciated by staff, it’s a sign of your commitment to make training real, not just a compliance check-off. It is also vital to any corporation who wants to stand out from the crowd; who wants to say, “Our employees take special care of your loved one – experience it and you’ll see the difference.” You’ll only deliver on that promise if you truly train for a higher level of care than the next company. Not just today, but every single day, throughout the entire year.

How do you build sustainability in service delivery? You set up a standard of training for each new employee, a standard for every existing employee, and you develop reporting and accountability systems – and incentives – on the part of your managers.

Then you can join me on the beach for a month, knowing the quality of the service you provide will continue to remain consistent and sustainable.

Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve built a multi-national company, a corporate LMS might be your solution. If you think you’re ready for this step, let me know. I’ll send you a personalized plan, and help you implement this every step of the way. Better training builds better teams, and that benefits us all.

5 things you need to know about corporate learning management systems, Part 2

In Part 1 of this article I shared some information about corporate learning management systems (LMSs) and pricing. Key concepts: having your own LMS gives you total control over courses. You can build your own courses (lots of tools are readily available and easy to use); you can license courses from reputable sources. Expect to either hire a full time online training coordinator, however, or purchase the LMS and support for this from a company that has an expertise in this area. The latter is the quickest way to get going.

In terms of pricing, remember the principle of “you get what you pay for.” You can get online staff training at rock-bottom prices, but if you want more features you should expect to pay just a little more. Do compare both pricing and product.

Let’s move on to another one of the “5 things you need to know:”

What content should I expect to include in a corporate LMS?

The LMS is the structure for online training; the content is what your employees will experience. Look for these elements:

1. Compliance basics. You should be able to meet your training compliance needs without re-creating courses or re-packaging. Some companies will package courses for you to meet specific orientation requirements, for example. Some will create compliance courses if they don’t already have them. Others offer a robust list of courses but you need to pick and choose what works. Be sure you get, at a minimum, compliance basic courses.
2. Service enhancing courses. If you provide memory care, look for a very full menu of courses that can allow you to train new and experienced employees.
3. Advanced level training. Your employees will have to complete basic compliance courses year after year. Make sure the course list you’re choosing from offers advanced level training as well as basics. One complaint we hear from employees is that they hate the repetitive nature of compliance training when it is limited to taking the same course over and over.
4. Courses that train and engage. This is a little more subjective. Simple training is fine for new employees but more experienced employees want more. They want to be challenged with new information; they want to be grabbed emotionally, too. Best practice in online training suggests that emotional learning is every bit as important as fact-based learning. It’s actually more important in building engagement and retention. Look at actual courses, and let your team members try them, too.
5. Courses that build your unique brand. Look for an LMS company that will provide you with tools, support and assistance in building your own courses. At a minimum, build a course introducing your company. This can be something as simple as a video interview with the company President or CEO, followed by some text with the company’s mission statement and purpose. Create it with some life and emotional impact; give team members ideas on how to reflect your unique brand in their everyday work, and then create a short scenario quiz to assess whether team members “get it.” Make this part of your new employee orientation, and watch your brand build.

Next week we’ll continue with a few more crucial questions and answers about e-learning to help you make the best decisions possible for your team. Better training builds better teams, and that benefits us all.

Innovation means using failure to grow your business

Innovation is the new business buzz word, it seems. Everyone is talking about companies that innovate being companies that will succeed in tough economic times, but no one talks about the risks of innovation.

Innovation means something new or different. Dictionary.com defines it as “the introduction of new things or methods.” Trying something new or different means risking failure – something most of us CEO types are pretty averse to doing.

Late Friday afternoon I was clicking through links I’d saved during the week to read “later.” I ended up on youtube.com and, as one can easily do there, I moved several clicks away from the original link that caught my attention

One video that struck me as worth listening to – twice – was an interview with Columbia Business School Professor Rita McGrath titled “Use Failure to Grow your Business” (see the full interview below).

My initial reaction was probably like yours: “I don’t plan on having any failures.” But it was a slow Friday afternoon, so I listened to the first few sentences and I was hooked.

Dr. McGrath is the author of “Discovery Driven Growth.” Her book is designed to give leaders tools to innovate in their business; to go where they have no past experience going before; where they risk, in fact, failure.

McGrath points out that as you innovate assumptions form the basis for your business decisions – not facts. If you had facts, as she puts it, “Anyone could do it.” But innovation, by its very definition, means doing something for which we can’t find a road map. It means traveling somewhere completely new to us.

The core idea of discovery-driven growth, then, is to “plan to learn not plan to be right.”

Hence the possibility of failures while we’re learning. While McGrath continues in her interview to talk about ways to fail quickly and fail cheaply as being crucial to the learning cycle, she also talks about setting the stage for success in the fundamentals; the things we can control.

If you’re looking for new ways to grow your business and succeed in a changing economic environment, take 10 minutes to listen to this video.

And while you’re considering ways to minimize your risk, let us help you cover the fundamentals of staff training and regulatory compliance in training. We’re innovating, too; offering you a risk-free trial to see how it works for your company (for details of this program contact Wendy Finch, VP of Business Development for aQuire Training at 877-843-8374 or Wendy@aquiretraining.com).

5 things you need to know about corporate learning management systems, Part 1

You know the value of training – you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise. You know that training your team is the way to significantly increase retention and build quality and reputation at the same time. You’re probably ready to at least begin considering using online learning as an adjunct to your current training program. Maybe you’ve even taken the plunge and signed on with an e-learning provider.

Whether you’re new to e-learning or just thinking about giving it a try, you can maximize the benefits by understanding a little more how to make e-learning truly yours. After all, you can’t really utilize the benefits of e-learning to help make your company more competitive if you’re just using off-the-shelf courses that your competitors use as well.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll share with you a few of the key concepts in making e-learning truly effective in helping you build a team that stands above the rest. While we’re at it, we’ll look at some of the terms and concepts involved in e-learning that may be new to you – they were all new to me when we first started out in this business several years ago.

Let’s start with the foundational structure of online or e-learning: the Learning Management System (LMS).

What’s an LMS and why should I care?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is different from a subscription you purchase from an e-learning company like aQuire. The LMS is the structure of the system; the courses are the content. The system should give you tools for quickly and easily managing employee enrollment, viewing grades and reports and even having special needs reporting features.

The aQuire Training Tracker module, for example, allows you to enter training received outside of the aQuire system into the reporting database so that you can, with one report, view all training completed by every employee, including conferences and inservices. You can set up exception reports that tell you who hasn’t completed required training, rather than having to pick through completed training lists to find those exceptions yourself. In short, a good LMS will give you the structure you need to manage the training and records of your whole team.

Having an LMS that you control allows you to build custom course content, too. With some programs, you’re simply subscribing to a set of pre-developed courses. With an LMS that you control, you can add your own courses using whatever development tools you wish – from simply PDF documents to flash-animated movies or games.

When you’re considering a new investment in e-learning – or looking for ways to make the investment you’ve already made pay off - look for a solution that allows you to have your own LMS, or at least your own LMS portal. You’ll gain a significant level of control of the training delivered to your team. And if you’re like most corporate execs I know, control of results is a very big deal.

How much should I expect to pay for e-learning?

If you’ve talked to anyone about developing a custom LMS for your company, you’ve probably heard cost estimates of upwards of $100,000 in development, and perhaps 50% of that on an annual support/hosting basis.

You may think that’s the best solution, especially if you want full control.

Here’s a secret: an LMS doesn’t have to be expensive. Open source LMS products are currently some of the best in the market, rivaling those used by corporate or university systems. You can have a custom LMS built, or license one that has been custom built, but you don’t have to do that to gain the same training advantage.

Here’s my advice: pay less for a basic supported LMS and a little bit more for your content. Think about what you want an online training system to do for you: give you the framework to deliver standard, high-quality, custom training and track every bit of training your employees have received in one simple report.

Beyond that, it’s all just bells and whistles. Where your investment really pays off, however, is in content. Your employees will never see the elegant reporting system or the easy-to-use enrollment portals. What they will see is content. They’ll need content that is engaging and effective.

What you need is a system that allows you to add your own custom content quickly and easily, and gives you the support you need to develop and add that content without costing you an arm and leg in tech support fees.

You may be able to negotiate the LMS into a deal for no cost at all, especially if you’re paying for content for many employees. If you do need to purchase your own LMS set up you should look for fees no greater than $2,000-3,000 on a one time basis.

Course content fees typically are based on the number of employees in your company and can range anywhere from $2 – 10 per person per month, depending on your size and the company you purchase courses from. Like with most products, you’ll pay a little more for courses with more features than for very basic courses that are designed to simply meet compliance requirements. Choose the product that best meets your needs for training. You know that investing in your team is worthwhile; don’t try to skimp when it comes to providing quality training.

Next week we’ll continue with a few more crucial questions and answers about e-learning to help you make the best decisions possible for your team. Better training builds better teams, and that benefits us all.

Best of the best awards

Love those best of the best awards, don’t you? How many did you win this year?

I hope you’re not one of those people that win awards like this year after year – you won’t be able to relate at all.

I’ve never won a “best of the best” award. I’ve never even been a runner-up. But day after day, week after week, month after month I continue to do work that I believe contributes to the quality of care we provide to today's elderly.

Most senior care companies, I’d venture to say, are a lot like me in that regard. They do their work, every day, month and year, focusing on the area where they can improve lives. Maybe it’s just 5 families that they serve; maybe its 40 families, or 400.

What matters, at the end of the day, however, is not how many awards you win, but how much difference you’ve made.

Has someone finally been able to take a guilt-free, stress-free vacation because of your work?

Has someone else had “ahaa” moments that led to more joyful caregiving because of your efforts?

Many of us innovate in our care every day. We creatively solve problems while managing budgets, employee challenges and difficult clients. We see needs and we work to meet them, often by creating new programs or simply adapting existing programs to meet individual needs.

So from me to you – and me to me – here’s an award: The Quietly-going-about-our-business-while-making-a-real-difference Award.

Just around the corner

One of my alternate routes to work takes me on a path through a sizeable green space behind my house. I need a few extra minutes if I’m taking this path, but I try to set the time aside at least once a week.

Last week, the route took an extra hour, rather than the usual 15 minutes. I had to stop every few steps to take another picture (my favorite feature of my new phone). It was astonishingly beautiful, with wildflowers blanketing the meadow and trees in bloom. I even saw a deer wandering through the trees – a very unusual sight in these woods. By the time I whipped out my phone to take a quick picture, he had sauntered back off into the woods.

I’ve been watching for change particularly closely this spring. Our winter was long and harsh. The trees were just big, barren sticks far into the usual season of new growth. But when spring finally arrived, the transformation seemed to happen right before my eyes. Leaves filled out the undergrowth first, then slowly appeared on the oaks and maples, starting as a light green haze and then, within days, expanding to vast canopies of leaves.

I’ve been looking for signs of spring in our business, too. I’ve noticed how just a little change creates a dynamic cycle of growth. Sometimes we seem to spend a lot of energy with no results; then it blossoms into a period of growth and success.

The take-home lesson for me is simply this: our work isn’t wasted. Sometimes it is preparing the ground for the coming period of rapid growth. Sometimes it’s a matter of tending that growth so that it doesn’t overwhelm us. Often, like in nature, we need the right combination of elements to converge before our efforts will yield visible results.

If you feel like your marketing efforts, for example, are not taking you anywhere, think about the spring. Add in an upturn in the economy, more optimism on the part of prospective clients, and you may see your company experience a spring-like growth spurt, all because of the work you continued to do, even during what feels like the dormant season of no results.

Springtime in nature requires several elements to spur the growth. What we see as the results are stunningly beautiful. I have confidence that the springtime in this business cycle is just around the corner – and the results will be spectacular.

Key ideas for marketing to today’s seniors

If you’ve ever heard Ken Dychtwald, founder of Age Wave and visionary gerontologist/psychologist/author, speak about the concerns of mature adults today, you know that he often sees things from a unique perspective.

His latest book, Retirement at the Tipping Point, followed more than 2,000 people over time, resulting in a look at people’s attitude and experience before and during the current financial crisis. It contains some insights that may prove interesting to all of us who provide services to baby boomers and the elderly.

Financial concerns top the list of issues. This certainly isn’t a shocker, but realizing the depth of people’s concerns is certainly enlightening. With 60% of American’s losing money in their retirement funds, concerns about delay in retirement or unexpected expenses is at the forefront of today’s boomers. Interestingly, 81% of the people studied said that the most important piece of financial advice parents can give their children is to “live within your means;” up from only 69% who responded in this way before the market drop.

Lesson for providers? Emphasize, more than ever, the financial wisdom of your product or services. You not only need to demonstrate that you provide value for the dollar; you need to be prepared to discuss how your product or service will comfortably fit within the means of the prospect.

Values are shifting from wealth to relationships. Relationships within families are becoming increasingly important as families support members financially and emotionally. Twice as many respondents identified that “loving family and relationships” are more important than being wealthy.

Lesson for providers? Include family members in conversations whenever possible. Point out ways that your product or service can enhance relationships, especially if you offer personal care services that can allow the family to focus on relationships instead of tasks. Point out how your service can offer family peace of mind, as well, especially if you can emphasize areas where you exceed the usual standards, for example in the training or qualifications of your employees. Frame your benefits in terms of building and nurturing the relationships among the family or friends of the prospective client.

Retirees are seeking to make a difference. They want meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, even into later life. They’d rather not just be stuffing envelopes, either.

Lesson for providers? Be sure your activity and enrichment programs, if you offer them, include opportunities for clients at all levels to continue to contribute. Crocheting hats and scarves for kids or the homeless is something nearly anyone can do, for example.

Overall, Americans are resilient and resourceful, reports Dychtwald. Today, they’re more focused than ever on benefits that have meaning – and fit financially – in their lives.